mji

> A decade ago, it was a real flex in San Francisco to say you worked at Meta, Google, Apple, Tesla ... That’s not what it feels like anymore.

Sure but that's just because there are now different companies (AI labs) on this list instead

> At very large software companies, programming ability, technical expertise, and raw resources are not the limiting factors. Coordination is.

If coordination is your limiting factor I'd argue that it shouldn't be, and you're not investing enough in removing it as a factor. Companies can use various tools to do this, for example:

* Defining directly responsible individuals / single-threaded leaders so that every choice doesn't involve massive coordination

* Putting people who work together in the office sitting next to each other most days of the week

* Or, for remote work, having a strong culture of async communication that is visible to the broader group by default, for example with Slack

Until recently?

Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG.

Maybe OP learned these things precisely because he saw the consequences of them not being done

Even if we suppose all those things are true (not a given), I would not expect these layoffs to meaningfully change them.

Because their hiring process will just hire more employees who will take advantage of the system

I think CEO types simply believe (rightly or wrongly) that a large number of people are taking advantage of WFH to barely work.

> 'generating new code' is a small part of the job

I think this attitude has been taken too far to the point that people (especially senior+ engineers) end up spending massive amounts of time debating and aligning things that can just be done in far less time (especially with AI, but even without it). And these big companies need to change that if they want to get their productivity back. From the article:

> One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas."

> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job

This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)

it's very hard to tell when an individual has solved a problem that otherwise would have taken 5 people to solve... so you'll likely find that it's much easier for big tech to reward people for managing large teams or leading large teams to execute on a project rather than for solving such problems themselves